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The “high-risk” patient

A "high risk" patient with legal addictions to junk food and tobacco.
She would be an excellent candidate for a trial of a drug to "treat" the symptoms, like "cholesterol", of a self-destructive lifestyle. Such people are beloved of drug dealers and trialist doctors on their payrolls because they are "high risk" and have high rates of "events" (i.e. artery bypass, heart attack and death) allowing investigators to publish papers faster and drug dealers to sell more drugs. Thus, all testing of drugs for lifestyle diseases necessitates conflict of interest. To insist that such people change their habits first would reduce "events", most of which are non-fatal, and prolong trials for so long that the high-paid "trialists" would die of old age before enough "events" had been registered to be statistcally significant. So NO trial of drugs for diseases of lifestyle has ever made a serious attempt to change lifestyles before trying drugs. All such trials were and are, therefore, UNETHICAL. Reports of the results of such trials should be retracted by the journals involved and the results should be ignored by all doctors. All such ongoing trials should be halted immediately.

The temptation was too great. American and Canadian professional fund raisers and catheter-wielding interventional radiologists around the world have been drooling over the ability of foreign clinics in places like India, Poland, Mexicao, Costa Rica, Bulgaria and Egypt to rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars per week flogging the Zamboni “CCSVI” and “liberation” scam for “treating” MS patients. So fund raisers at the University of Maryland, following the example of those at the University of British Columbia, convinced or, more likely, were convinced by Dr. Ziv Haskal, an interventional radiologist who stands to make many millions of dollars doing “liberation”, to ride Zamboni’s “CCSVI” hysteria to fatten the endowment of the University while giving legitimacy to the scam. UBC is using the scam to raise funds for a new MRI machine that will probably be used for other purposes than trying to diagnose “CCSVI”. But U of M is using the bait of implying that Haskal will actually be doing “liberation”. If so, this will be the first university-sanctioned use of “liberation” other than Zamboni’s University of Ferrara. Neither university is in the top 100 of the world’s universities. Ferrara isn’t even in the top 500.

Perhaps we should not be too surprised. After all, only 40% of the US population accepts the theory of evolution as the explanation for the variety of life on the planet, the most important scientific concept in history; presumably, the majority, 60%, believe in some form of creation or “intelligent design”. If one can believe the latter, one should have no reservations about accepting that internal jugular veins can cause damage to the brain without raising intracranial pressure and even if it did raise intracranial pressure could cause damage selectively to the slowly-metabolizing, myelin-producing cell of the white matter BEFORE damaging the much more sensitive rapidly-metabolizing cells of the grey matter of the brain. Interventional radiology, while requiring a certain degree of manual dexterity, certainly doesn’t require more than a superficial knowledge of physiology and metabolism and doesn’t preclude a belief in creation.

“CCSVI” is junk science and its “treatment” by “liberation”, dilating presumably blocked neck veins to “cure” MS, is one of the greatest surgical hoaxes in medical history. Performing any medical procedure with no scientific evidence of benefit but with potential risk is grossly unprofessional and contrary to the Hippocratic Oath.

“CCSVI” is the crack cocaine of surgical scams. It has been estimated that at least three BILLION dollars will be spent next year by MS patients pursuing the Zamboni’s mirage, dwarfing other recent surgical scams like “bariatric” surgery.